To Break An Arrancar
by Shatteredsand
Summary: Aizen is building an army and only the strongest are allowed entrance into its ranks. But what determines strength? Waiting on the other side of the Hōgyoku is more than anyone could have imagined. Arrancar aren't born, they're broken.


**AN: This just popped into my head. Don't ask me to explain it; I couldn't if I tried. The torture is extremely detailed, the sex is not. I'm just about physically incapable of writing any kind of lemon. :( **

**Warnings: Language, graphic torture, implied rape, implied slash, Slashy-Creeper!Aizen (who I think might be OOC), Slashy! Ulquiorra, Gin being frighteningly perceptive and perhaps a little OOC**

**Disclaimer: I don't own Bleach or The Legend of the Seeker, whose line "Mord'Sith aren't made, they're broken." inspired the idea.**

**To Break An Arrancar**

Hanging from heavy chains lies Aizen's newest potential Esparda. The panther had turned well, utterly human in form except for his Hollow hole and fragmented mask. His hair is a unique shade of sky blue, a perfect compliment to his aqua eyes. His body is flawless, the embodiment of masculinity. Rippling but lean, smooth muscles under even smoother skin. He looks like a god, even if he's really much closer to a demon. A smirk crawls over Aizen's features at the thought. He supposes that makes him the devil.

Aizen drags a hand across the toned musculature of Grimmjow's chest watching with sadist glee as the flesh bubbles and burns under the careful touch of his kido. The Arrancar grits his teeth and refuses to release the scream Aizen knows is scratching at his throat. And that is the problem, the reason he's decided to see to this breaking himself: Grimmjow Jaggerjack Will. Not. _Break_.

Grimmjow is at once Aizen's favorite pet and his most hated. The Hollow will not succumb to the agony inflicted upon him, a trait both admirable and irritating. Impatient, Aizen sends a miniscule Cero through the rebellious Arrancar's chest. It is a tiny hole through flesh and muscle and bone, a faultless burn that cauterizes the wound through and through. But it doesn't touch organ, so Aizen feels no need to end his training session early. Grimmjow squeezes his eyes closed, the only indication that he's felt anything.

Aizen knots a hand in the beautiful cerulean locks and jerks Grimmjow's head up, forces azure eyes to meet chocolate. "I am losing my patience, Arrancar." An effortless backhand that snaps his head to the side and draws blood from his lips. "I will have you as my own." A hand wraps securely around his throat, gripping with just enough force to make breathe difficult and movement impossible. "And if pain—" A series of rapid knees to Grimmjow's groin that draws silent tears from his striking blue eyes. "won't get it done." A sudden kiss with bruising force. Grimmjow tries to pull away, rather violently. But Aizen's control is far too precise. When he pulls away, Aizen is pleased to note that Grimmjow looks thoroughly disgusted and absolutely horrified by what he is implying. Good.

"The things I can have done to you," Aizen pauses, a frighteningly mirthful smirk pulling on his lips, "the things I can _enjoy_ doing to you are nearly limitless, Grimmjow Jaggerjack."

Revulsion coils in the trapped man's eyes, fear and hatred mar his flawless features. Aizen is pleased. "Ulquiorra!" He calls and the pale man appears nearly instantly at the summons. "The newest brother seems rather reluctant to swear his allegiance."

"What would you have me do?" He asks without infliction, a statue of unwavering loyalty carved from the coldest stone. Aizen needs to praise Neliel's work on this one; he is the personification of a proper breaking. It's too bad he'd sent her off on a reconnaissance mission shortly after the panther's transformation. She'd be all but invaluable right about now.

"Simply what is necessary to break the creature." Aizen says with an elegant shrug. "Nothing more, nothing less."

Ulquiorra doesn't bother to pretend he doesn't understand, merely bends to Aizen's will like the ocean to the moon. He traces his hands over the exquisite flesh before him, forest green eyes roaming over the entirety of the bound Arrancar. "Should it be painful?"

"There should always be pain, Ulquiorra." Aizen says with a cruel smirk. "Always."

* * *

The scream is torn from Grimmjow's unwilling lips six hours later. He doesn't scream the words Aizen had been expecting, pleadings for an end, shouts of "no more", useless begging for it all to just _stop_ already; he doesn't scream words at all. He screams hate and pain and fear and shame. He screams everything that had made the panther strong and everything that makes him weak. He screams until there is no air in his lungs and then he screams some more, silently unable to even draw breath.

Aizen wipes the sweat from his brow with a pleased smirk. His eyes memorize every line of the Arrancar's anguished, silent shriek. Twenty-seven days, 18 hours, and 42 minutes of grueling, continuous torture should have been enough to break any Hollow, and Grimmjow is just beginning to crack.

* * *

Grimmjow wants to die. No, that isn't quite true, he doesn't want to die. He wants to _live_. Not like this, as some puppet dancing on his master's strings. His master's fucking _twisted_ strings. Actually live, to have some semblance of control, some mockery of life. Even in death. But he's so tired. He hasn't slept in over a month. Aizen won't let him. And the torment that bastard and Ulquiorra inflicts at all times is exhausting.

An ashen white hand backhands him, disrupting whatever might have been thoughts. Olive eyes glaring with curiosity and just a hint of anger bore into him, "You are being hopelessly obstinate."

Grimmjow hates that voice; it's so emotionless, so dead. And Grimmjow wants to feel alive. He won't break. He won't. He won't become an empty husk of a man like Ulquiorra. He simply refuses to. They can break his body, mutilate it beyond recognition. They can break his mind, shatter it until he can't put the pieces back together. But his spirit, that is his. And nothing they can conceive of will _ever_ change that.

"Fuck off." He breathes out shakily, knowing it's pointless to remain silent; they already know how to make him scream, they don't need him to actually speak. In fact, since he's mostly insulting them profanely, they'd probably much prefer if he didn't.

"Don't be so vulgar."

"That'll come later."

Two different voices, two different answers, two different people, the same pain. Aizen appears beside his fourth with that damned smirk. Grimmjow knows what's coming next and it makes him sick. If Hollows were capable of vomiting, Grimmjow thinks he'd be tasting bile on the back of his tongue.

Aizen's tanned hand strokes his cheek almost affectionately. Grimmjow snaps at it, but Aizen is much too fast to be caught by his worn out attempt. The hand returns, a thumb digging deep into his right eye.

"AHHHHHHH!" The scream is shrill and hoarse and when Aizen takes his hand back, Grimmjow's blue eye goes with it. Grimmjow can't breathe, can't think, can hardly hold back the plea on the tip of his tongue. Blood leaks from his socket like crimson tears.

Aizen runs his tongue along the scarlet trail and Grimmjow jerks away weakly. Aizen lets him go. "It's been 74 hours since his last healing ad I seem to have taken something rather important. Summon the healers." he looks at Ulquiorra, "Then, you have my permission to retire to your quarters until I call on you again."

"My lord." Ulquiorra bows respectfully and vanishes.

Aizen returns his attention to the weak and somewhat pitiful creature hanging from the ceiling. "Why won't you break, Grimmjow?" He manages to feign sorrow, but Grimmjow can see straight through the manipulative bastard. "Why are you making me hurt you?"

"Maybe," Grimmjow forces a grin despite the agony radiating from where his eye once was. "I get off on it."

"Then how come all of Ulquiorra's talents can't even get you hard?"

"I dunno." He gives the god-aspiring Shinigami a quick once over. "Maybe you should give it a try."

"You are here to serve my pleasure, not the other way around."

"You're right; I'm not a _flaming fag_ so it probably wouldn't do anything anyways." Grimmjow smirks with real, legitimate happiness at his small victory as Aizen's face drops from the casual politeness into enraged disbelief if only for a second. Then he's backhanding the Arrancar so hard Grimmjow feels his jaw break.

"Such disrespect will have to beaten out."

"You think everything should be beaten out." This voice, this face, this person is new. Frightfully pale, but in a human rather than Hollow tone. His sneering smile infuriating. _I'm _better_ than you_, it says. _You're _nothing, it says. _Nothing you have done or ever will do _matters, it says. Grimmjow wants to beat his smug face in until fist tears through flesh and muscle and bone and hits the arrogant Shinigami's brain out of his goddamned skull. "Give me five days with him, Aizen-Sama. Five days and I will break him."

_Like hell you will_, Grimmjow tries to say but talking around a broken jaw turns the words into alphabet soup: devoid of meaning and containing too many vowels.

"Five days."

* * *

Five days later and Grimmjow cannot move. Cannot blink, cannot breathe, cannot think. Gin had dispensed with the healings that Aizen had handed out when ever the chance of Grimmjow actually dying appeared. Gin doesn't have enough interest in his survival to care. Sure Aizen would be a little upset with him if the blue-haired hollow should die while under his care, but he'd get over it.

"Aizen-Sama is dead set on having you has one of his Espada." Gin says with the slightest hint of amusement, but then everything he says has that laughing tinge. "But I'll tell you a secret." Gin leans in and puts his lips to Grimmjow's bloodstained ear. "You're not going to break." Grimmjow manages a choking sound that Gin think might have been meant as words. He pulls away from him and observes the destruction he's wrought on the Arrancar.

Grimmjow's once sky blue hair is almost completely overrun by the crimson stain of his own blood. It oozes from the open wounds in his temples and runs down his face, covering the noble features in a gory mask of red. The aqua eyes Aizen had so admired are bloodshot; the whites nearly lost beneath the engorged veins and the blood vessels that have already popped in a cloud of hazy scarlet. A steady stream of dark blood drips from his shattered nose from the blood vessels in his brain that could not bear the strain and burst. Rivulets of red stream from where his throat was slit for the removal of his vocal cords to the once flawless expanse of flesh that had once been the Arrancar's chest and torso, now riddled with holes that bleed profusely but haven't damaged anything important and deep gouges that Gin hand clawed out with his own hands. His manhood had been set aflame and all that remained is a shriveled and charred husk of what you could almost tell had once been genitalia. Fingers bent backwards and sideways adorn palms that have cut to ribbons and arms that have twisted unnaturally with the occasional shard of unbelievably durable bone jutting through the skin. The skeleton of his legs is perfectly visible, the flesh split and torn loose but not free.

"I could have the healers fix what I've done in the past few days, then do it all over again." Gin sighs heavily. "But nothing would come of it. Oh, sure, you'd scream and cry and beg. And you'd mean it, you mean every last word…until the pain stopped.

"Then, you'd be just the same as ever. Hating Aizen and Ulquiorra and me for doing this to you. Planning every second of everyday to find a way to kill us even though we are _vastly_ superior to you in _every way_. But, no, you will not break. So I will not let you go. So you will never plot these plans. You will ever leave this room, Grimmjow Jaggerjack. You will hang in this dungeon and I will maim your body and soul and you will hate me with a passion you haven't had since you lived and breathed and died.

"But you will be powerless. Grimmjow Jaggerjack, the pantera, the Panther _King_ locked away and useless and _weak_." Gin sighs again, sneer still firmly in place. He touches Grimmjow's cheek lightly and slowly withdraws his hand as he turns his back on the mangled form of the future Espada. The sound of his departing footsteps echo in the deathly silent room, a real smile taking over the sneer for a fraction of a second.

* * *

"But you will be powerless. Grimmjow Jaggerjack, the pantera, the Panther King locked away and useless and _weak_." Gin says before touching his cheek softly. He takes the hand back slowly and starts to leave. Blind panic begins to bubble in Grimmjow's shattered form. Fear, from which all Hollows are born, tears at his insides. Ichimaru is going to leave him here, like this, for the rest of eternity. It will never end. The fucking asshole isn't even going to kill him.

_Please_, he tries to call to the retreating footsteps, but his vocal cords have been gone for a long time and a gurgling murmur that sends blood dribbling from his lips is the best he can manage. Oh gods, they don't even hesitate. _Don't leave me here_! Broken fingers, fleshless legs, and shredded body try to coordinate. Try to move. To do anything that will make the pale Shinigami stop and turn. Crimson tinted tears fall from aqua eyes and cut streaks through his own drying blood. Sobs that he cannot even begin to articulate wrack his torn body and send agony flaring through his already flayed nerves.

_Please, let me go! I'll do anything! I'll _be_ anything! Oh gods, just don't _leave_ me here_! The words won't come. They won't escape his throat and tumble out his lips. The hopelessness of despair washes through him and he sobs harder. Cries die silent on his tongue and he curses every thing that has ever lived without words._ I want to be strong! I want to be the King again! I want to be _strong_!..._**please**_…_

* * *

Somewhere deep inside the Hollow a lonely panther sheds a single crimson tear. It streaks through deathly white fur and he lets loose a helpless, anguished roar.

Grimmjow Jaggerjack had been _broken_.


End file.
